Survey Techniques to Examine Morphological
Evolution of Coastal Regions

Seth Ammons, MS., 2024
Britt Raubenheimer, Advisor
Steve Elgar, Advisor

Beaches are dynamic, changing with tides, winds, and waves. Here, a beach was mapped daily
for 3 weeks from the dune to the low-tide water line on the Outer Banks of North Carolina at the
US Army Corps of Engineers Field Research Facility in Duck. The 22,500 m2 area of interest
was surveyed daily by a walker carrying a GPS-equipped backpack and occasionally with a lidar
equipped drone. Surveys of the northern region of interest also were collected with a stationary
terrestrial lidar mounted on the dune. The observed morphological events include the destruction
and formation of a cusp field during which there was 1.4 m of erosion and accretion associated
with bays and horns, and the formation over 7 days of a ~1-m high ridge and runnel system. The
GPS-equipped backpack apparatus was used as ground truth for estimates made with the lidar
systems. Along both cross- and alongshore transects the lidar elevations were within
approximately 0.05 m of those estimated by the backpack surveys, with RMS errors less than
0.11 m.